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As the calendar year 1989 began, Jews in what were then the Soviet satellite states (Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, East Germany, and Bulgaria) knew pretty much what they could look forward to: calls for world peace (the Soviet way), condemnations of imperialist America and its evil puppet Israel, along with slim pickings in the way of fresh fruit. By the time 1990 began, they were living in a very different world.

Ever since the one party state cemented control of these countries in 1948, rabbis had been run out of town, seminaries and Jewish schools had been closed, kosher food became all but impossible to obtain, and if you showed up for synagogue services (even without a fully ordained rabbi officiating), your future job prospects would dry up.

As if that wasnt bad enough, the official Jewish communities in every one of these countries seemed to exist solely to serve up a steady stream of anti-Israel propaganda, as prepared and precooked for them by the Central Committee of the Communist Party.

Little surprise that most Jews wanted little or nothing to do with the official Jewish organizations, although the communities usually allowed for Hanukkah and Purim parties, which were the two times in a year Jews felt safe getting together without fear of reprisal.

Then something happened. The political changes that began in June 1989, started as a brush fire, gathered strength, grew into an inferno that swept the region, and sent every central committee fleeing for the exit. By the time Hanukkah ended on Dec. 29, the Communists were looking at nothing but scorched earth, while everyone else wanted to start planting seedlings.

That meant Jews in these countries were ready to deal with the official community organs that had been spewing anti-Israel propaganda and preventing their children from studying Hebrewor learning even the first thing about Judaism. It didnt happen everywhere, all at once, but change was in the air.

Although no one loved the community leadership in Hungary, it did operate both a small Jewish school and a rabbinical seminary in Budapest that functioned during the Communist decades, and by 1989, the Lauder Foundation was about to open a new school while the Joint Distribution Committee opened its first office in Budapest since 1948. Further, by September 1989 Zionist youth clubs were given the green light to set up shop once again, Hebrew classes were being held in several locations every week, a half dozen synagogues drew congregants regularly and a Jewish summer camp functioned on Lake Balaton (the much larger camp at Szarvas would open in July 1990).

Romania had always been the odd man out. The dictator Nicolae Ceausescu was the only Warsaw Pact leader not to sever diplomatic ties with Israel in 1967, and the Jewish community operated choirs and a summer camp and Talmud Torah classes ran weekly in four cities. If any family asked for a bar mitzvah, Chief Rabbi David Moses Rosen made sure the child was prepared properly.

Poland was also an outlier. First, there were few Jews who were even registered in the 1980s, and to the communitys credit, at least it ran soup kitchens for elderly Holocaust survivors in Wroclaw and Warsaw along with a Yiddish theater in Warsaw. There was, however, little to nothing on offer for younger Jews. Much would happen in the coming years, as Jewish families came out of the woodwork and hundreds (some claim thousands) of younger Poles discovered genuine, or at least tenuous, Jewish roots.

But it was in Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria, two of the most hard-line states, where Jews launched their revolt during Hanukkah of 1989 and in January of 1990.

Dezider Galsky (born Goldfinger) had been a diplomat in the Czechoslovak foreign service, and a historian who had published several books on the Middle East. In 1980, he agreed to serve as president of Czechoslovakias Jewish Federation.

It was under his aegis that the Prague Jewish Museums blockbuster exhibition, The Precious Legacy, began its world tour. Galsky often went with it to speakalways diplomaticallybut it did him little good. The Communist Party had no idea that an exhibition of Czech Judaicanearly all of it gathered from Bohemian Jewish communities wiped out during the Holocaustwould garner such praise wherever it went, and that infuriated them. Galsky was accused of corruption, removed in 1985 and in his place came Frantisek Kraus, a man of such a complex background it beggars belief.

Born in the Czech Republic, Kraus and his family had been sent to Theresienstadt; I had once photographed him in front of the barracks where he was interned. He and his family were sent to Auschwitz where they perished and he survived. At wars end, Kraus left for Palestine, fought with the Haganah in Israels War of Independence, but decided to return home in the 1950s.

He was immediately imprisoned and, I was told, tortured by the authorities for being a Zionist spy and had even been threatened with a firing squad, but a general amnesty at the last minute freed him. Years later, Galsky gave him a job running the kosher kitchen in the Jewish community center, but when Galsky fell out of favor with the authorities, Kraus offered to take his place.

During his tenure at the Jewish Federation, Kraus forbade any programs that had to do with Israel, and when a group of younger community members asked him to at least consider allowing a Hebrew language course, he informed the secret police, who went and grilled everyone who had even asked him.

The one Jewish organization we did have, said Andrej Ernyei, a piano tuner and jazz musician, was our Jewish choir. Almost all of us were adults, and most of us had kids. Singing Hebrew songs together was the one thing we could do together as Jews, and Kraus didnt think we could do harm to anyone. But he was wrong. Were the one who pushed him out.

When Hanukkah came that December, and choir members were thrilled as the Communists were being hounded out of office, they demanded a communitywide meeting with Kraus. And with no one answering at party headquarters to help him out, Kraus gritted his teeth and prepared for the reckoning.

Hundreds of Jews crowded into the venerable hall on Meiselova Street and demanded he resign, and Dezider Galsky was asked to resume his old post. Kraus agreed, and not long after, Galsky asked Tomas Kraus (no relation), an executive at one of the countrys larger artists agencies, to become the general secretary.

Galsky knew hed need someone to help run things, as he was suddenly the name in everyones Rolodex. I just took Francois Mitterrand around the Jewish quarter, he told me in January 1990, Margaret Thatcher is coming and I cannot count the number of foreign ministers who have showed up, often with no warning at all.

Frantisek Kraus refused to apologize for anything he had done, but later came to Tomas Kraus and he practically begged me to allow him to be buried in the Jewish cemetery. He really did fear this would be the worst possible punishment. Of course I said yes, and he left the community. I never saw him again, although I was told he spent his last years as a security guard in a department store.

If Czechoslovakia was a hard-line Communist state, the countrys leadership was positively enlightened compared to Bulgarias aging Central Committee, headed by Tudor Zhivkov, who, by 1989, had ruled his country since 1954 and was now 78 years old.

With its economy in free fall in 1989, it wasnt hard for more moderate members of the Communist Party to force Zhivkov from power only one day after the Berlin Wall fell on Nov. 9. A few days after that, Bulgarian Jews gathered in the Jewish community center on Stambolijski Boulevard and had come with a suggestion for the Jewish community leadership headed by Iosif Astrukov. Namely: resign. Now.

Robert Djerassi described the scene. We didnt know how many would come but at least 150 people showed up, and although there was some tension and a lot of excitement, I remember saying that we needed to thank those who had run the community until now, but it was time for a new administration. Astrukov agreed to step down, and Eddy Schwartz, a publisher, theater director and novelist, was asked to take over.

By the time 1990 had begun, a new Jewish cultural organization had been launched: Shalom: the Organization of Jews in Bulgaria. And everyone would be welcomed.

Djerassi said that we inherited a five story building with almost nothing in it, other than a typewriter dating from 1880 and a secretary who managed the office. There was also a museum with a giant photograph of Czar Boris III shaking the hand of Adolf Hitler, which led into a museum of how Communists saved the Jews of Bulgaria.

Becca Lazarova, who would be the first director of the Lauder Jewish school in Sofia, said, We, the parents, knew almost nothing about being Jewish, and so at night we would teach ourselves, and then work alongside our children the next day in class.

Although Jewish organizations like JDC and ORT rushed in to help as Bulgarias economic collapse deepened, Schwartz never lost his sense of optimism. In September of 1990, when I asked him how Shalom was going to overcome its difficulties, he said, We have around 4,000 Jews in this country. Out of that we have 10 composers, 10 poets, 150 journalists, 12 theater directors, 200 full professors, six members of parliament with, of course, three on each side, 70 lawyers and nearly 100 doctors. So when it comes to tackling our problems, Id say we have the right people to do it.

The Jewish communities in Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria were the first to make serious changes during and after the fall of Communism in 1989, but they would not be the last. In 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed and communities in Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia started rebuilding Jewish life with an enthusiasm that belied their meager numbers. Then came Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova.

Well over a million Jews would leave the Soviet Union as soon as they could, but that is a topic of another discussion, as is the story of how 150,000 opted to move to Germany, where they have given that community something it did have in the 1980s: a future.

The Central European Jewish communities, the ones wedged between Germany and what had been the Soviet Union, were all about to face a difficult road, a road they are still traveling three decades later. Except for the city of Budapest, where well more than 50,000 Jews live, no Jewish community in this region has a long-term future. The numbers, the critical mass, just isnt there.

But that is not the point. Starting 30 years ago, when 1990 began, the Jewish communities of Central and Eastern Europe started grabbing back a future that had been denied them for far too long. And they were throwing off the mantle of remnant like a garment that no longer fit. It is, after all, not a story about numbers. Its about the dignity of the effort.

***

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Edward Serotta is a journalist, photographer and filmmaker specializing in Jewish life in Central and Eastern Europe.

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Reclaiming Jewish Life After the Nightmare of Communism - Tablet Magazine

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Every now and then, a younger writer will approach the critic and memoirist Vivian Gornick and profess love for a book she routinely disparages: The Romance of American Communism, the oral history of the American left that she published in 1977. If, as often happens, her admirer is too young to remember the Cold War, Gornick tries to clarify a point that she fears has been missed. I say, This is about the Communist Party, not social democracy, she says, sitting in her West Village apartment one afternoon in November. It was the most authoritarian she trails off into incredulous laughter. I dont know why they want to read it.

When I arrive at the apartment where Gornick has lived for more than 35 years, shes dressed all in black, her blue-gray eyes emphasized by bold black liner and silver shadow. Her home is unshowy, with comfortable furniture that bears the evidence of cat claws and with books stacked on the dining-room table and crammed onto white-painted floor-to-ceiling shelves. In conversation, as in her writing, Gornick is sometimes lyrical (It was like iron in my mouth, she says of reading Me Too testimony that echoed the humiliations she experienced in her own 20s), sometimes wryly provocative (Is that good for us or bad for us?, she asks when I explain that the Cut is a womens vertical). She has written about living alone as a feminist project about the emotional assaults of loneliness and the vital self-possession that rewards those who withstand it. (Several years ago, she softened her solitude by adopting two cats. She informs me that the one that hops onto the side table during our interview is less attractive than the one that hides from company.)

Gornick, likewise, does not seek the spotlight. Though she deserves as much credit as any writer alive for codifying the current form of the personal essay The Paris Review has credited her with pioneering the genre of personal criticism now associated with essayists such as Leslie Jamison, Maggie Nelson, and Jia Tolentino her influence as a writer has always outstripped her exposure. Other authors have long valued her writing about writing its unyielding frustrations and the battle for selfhood it encompasses. Perhaps most beloved among her 12 books are a pair of memoirs: Fierce Attachments, from 1987, and The Odd Woman and the City, from 2015, both of which consider her struggle to forge an unconventional life. A 13th book, Unfinished Business, a reflection on rereading done in her signature hybrid of memoir and criticism, comes out in February. Over the years, a certain romance has accrued to the person of Gornick herself, a born-and-bred New Yorker, radical second-wave feminist, and archetypal staffer for the late, great downtown alt-weekly The Village Voice. Though she says she has always felt like an outsider in literary circles, her work sits at the heart of an alternative canon in which art grows from the politics of being oneself.

Until recently, Gornick was not as well known as the writers whose work owes a debt to hers, but in the past few years, that seems to be changing. Shes started to sell around the world, says her editor at FSG, Ileene Smith. Fierce Attachments has been translated into 13 languages in the past four years. It must be a zeitgeist thing something shes connecting with in some profound literary, almost spiritual way, Smith says. At the age of 84, Gornick has become quite a literary figure, well beyond her own very I would say unreasonably modest expectations for herself.

Of all the books she has in the offing, the one receiving the most buzz in literary circles is a reissue of Romance by the leftist publisher Verso this spring. In an interview with New York last year, political theorist Corey Robin called it possibly the best book ever written about [the] inner life of socialists. It received mixed reviews in its own day, including an evisceration by the literary critic and prominent socialist Irving Howe that sent me to bed for a week, Gornick says. Her aim had been to capture the emotional allure the romance that drew so many ordinary Americans to become communists, but critics accused her of falling in love with her subjects and skating past the problem of their fealty to the Soviet Union. Today, Gornick dismisses the prose as disfigured by rhetoric, and the book itself as apprentice work. She is baffled by its sudden popularity among a new generation of leftists.

Its hard to say why Gornick didnt gain her current following earlier. Maybe she was just ahead of her time, writing memoir before the genres boom in the late 1990s, or maybe by writing about feminism and politics with the sensibility of a literary critic, and vice versa she slipped through the cracks between easily marketable categories. Five years ago, Gornick said in an interview with The Paris Review that accepting her limited recognition has sometimes felt like a bitter pill to swallow. Does she still feel that way, I ask? Oh, sure, she says. But I was sorry I said that. She doesnt want to be petty, even though she acknowledges that in a way its not petty the hunger for glory is something no human being is free of. But if she could change one thing about her life, she says, it would be her tortured relationship with her writing, not the number of people who read it. In the end, I can always say that whatever else I yearn for in life, the thing that was absolute and unconditional was my hunger to write, she says. Nothing else approached that for me. The attention of younger fans makes her feel good that the work Ive done feels useful to other people, but thats all. No more than that.

In her writing, Gornick presents herself as an Odd Woman, a figure fundamentally out of step with the values and norms of the society in which she lives. Shes a product of radical politics: a feminist who eschews marriage and motherhood, and a misfit whose indifference to money and mainstream ideas of success carries an anti-capitalist undertone. But its the power and pain of the Odd Woman to be singular, forever apart. She has the clarity of an impartial observer even when she feels the zeal of a convert. Perhaps this paradox is what makes her work feel immediate (and, as she says, useful) to a younger generation of leftists and feminists still figuring out what it means to be defined by ones politics. Even in Romance, her most political book, Gornick doesnt write about politics she writes about how it feels to live through a political time and what it takes to join in without losing ones sense of self.

As she writes in Romance, Gornick was what she calls a red-diaper baby born into a world of working-class, Yiddish-speaking party members and fellow travelers in 1935. She was served Marxism at the kitchen table of her childhood home in the Bronx, where she would sit and listen to her parents and their friends. She renounced communism in that same kitchen at the age of 20 in 1956, after reading Nikita Khrushchevs speech acknowledging the extent of Stalinist terror. After graduating from City College, she moved to California to pursue graduate studies at Berkeley but dropped out, married and quickly divorced twice, and found herself back in New York working in publishing and freelancing with the occasional piece for the Voice. Her lasting political awakening came with her introduction to feminism in 1970, when she was assigned to cover a meeting of what her editor termed womens libbers on Bleecker Street for the Voice, which had by then hired her as a staff writer. Overnight, my inner life was galvanized, she later wrote. It was as though the kaleidoscope of experience had been shaken and when the pieces settled into place an entirely new design had been formed. She got to know prominent radicals such as Ti-Grace Atkinson, Kate Millett, and Shulamith Firestone, and she wrote searing feminist criticism of contemporary novels by the likes of Joan Didion and Anne Roiphe.

By the mid-1970s, her relationship with the movement had started to sour. Gornick perceived an emerging party line that seemed to mirror the one that had silenced her parents doubts about the Soviet Union: When she disagreed with a speaker at a feminist meeting in Boston, the woman accused her of being an intellectual and a revisionist. I realized that feminism wasnt enough to understand my place in society or in history, she tells me. It was not going to give me inner peace. I really didnt like myself; I felt I was always alienating people. Gornick writes that her break with feminist activism taught her to sympathize with her parents and their communist friends. She resolved to interview as many members of the old left as possible and weave their voices into a book about the partys emotional hold, from which so many had been unable to escape.

There are, it seems to me, a number of stable hungers in the human psyche, Gornick writes in Romance. One of these hungers, beyond question, is the need to live a life of meaning. Gornicks subjects describe the transformative power of working for a revolution they believed was around the corner. Every time I wrote a leaflet or marched on a picket line or went to a meeting I was remaking the world, says one person she interviewed, describing how that sense of purpose gave me a home inside myself. Many other communists described similar changes to their innermost lives as a result of their activism. I didnt feel lonely, says one. For another, Marxism healed a wound in the soul. Everything in my life became one, says a third. Everywhere I was the same person.

The communists of Romance speak directly to a problem Gornick seeks to pinpoint in all of her work: how to create a self you can live with, one strong enough to make its place in the world. Gornick has invented her own idiom for this struggle, which she sometimes calls the search for a sense of all-in-allness of world and self and other times refers to as a quest for expressiveness a word that, in her work, connotes both inner clarity and the ability to translate that insight outward. Politics opens up one conduit to this feeling. Through Marxism, the people at my fathers kitchen table could place themselves, Gornick writes in Romance, and if they could place themselves compelling insight! they could become themselves The men and women at the kitchen table were involved in nothing less than an act of self-creation.

At the Voice, Gornick was, by her own account, a polemicist on the barricades for radical feminism. After she left the paper, the year Romance was published, her work moved toward memoir and literary criticism and away from orthodoxy of any kind. If anyone picks up a book of mine, its eminently clear that a feminist is writing, she says, no matter what Im writing about. But writing itself, living a life defined by work and intellect rather than love or marriage, became her primary feminist commitment.

She narrates the slow dawning of this realization in Fierce Attachments, a memoir framed by her battles with her mother and her mothers idea of womanhood, which revolved around romantic love. Her new book, Unfinished Business, surveys similar territory by tracing her changing relationship with the novels that have meant the most to her. She tells of how, as a young woman, she read romantically, to be swept away by stories of love. After discovering feminism, she read the same novels politically, seeing for the first time that most of the female characters in them were stick figures devoid of flesh and blood. More recently, she tells me, I began to see, in every great work I read, that all great writers struggle, essentially, with cohering. And even though we cant cohere, and we dont, and everyone knows it practically from birth, its still a yearning, and that yearning dominates literature.

A writer whose gaze has turned increasingly inward is an odd patron saint for the resurgent, millennial left a disjunction that became clear in December when Gornick provoked a minor backlash on Twitter by telling Jewish Currents that she doesnt find Bernie Sanders inspiring or believe he can win the presidency. (Shes not much of an Elizabeth Warren fan, either: Neither one of them has a chance, but even if they did, it feels as if they would sink into the way things are rather than be the forerunners of change, she tells me.) In the abstract, she says, she still views political activism as one path toward a coherent self, though it takes vigilance not to lose that self in the task: The most important thing is not to submit to an authority that makes you deny the evidence of your own senses or your own mind, ever. But she has a hard time imagining how anyone could find meaning in our current political moment. For the communists she wrote about in Romance, who believed the world would be remade in their lifetimes, there was the sense of actually living a real and exciting life just by doing the homeliest of political tasks. You know, selling The Daily Worker on the corner, she says. Today, in contrast, it doesnt feel like a political time. In other words, people arent fired by the hope of it. Even Me Too, though she acknowledges it has been useful, strikes her as having no real politics its just anger.

But doesnt she feel the earliest vibrations of something shifting, I ask? Even if she is unmoved by the progressive candidates running for president, what about the regroupings of the labor movement, the mainstreaming of Medicare for All discourse, or, yes, the thousands of young socialists expected to provide an audience for her decades-old book? It doesnt feel like right before the 60s, even though things are worse than they were right before the 60s, she says. It doesnt feel like a gathering storm. By now, its dark in her apartment, though its still late afternoon, and Gornick fumbles with a lamp whose light isnt strong enough to burn off the sense of gloom. I dont want you to get depressed, she says kindly. For herself: I can live with it.

Whether you agree with Gornicks prognosis, the sense of impossible odds she describes may help explain the revival of interest in Romance. Lana Povitz, a 33-year-old activist and historian of social movements who is one of the books proselytizers, acknowledges that young leftists are less likely than the ones Gornick wrote about to think the end of capitalism might actually be imminent. If that goal seems out of reach, she says, then what remains is the day-to-day process, the social and emotional world of activism. Romance was criticized in its own era for celebrating some of the emotions that attended Communist Party membership while eliding many of the actions done in the partys name. But in hindsight, its clear that Romance provided something rarer than an evenhanded account of history: a look into the affective life of the American left. In some ways, I think political emotion is the best thing weve got going right now, says Povitz. Its who people feel they are when theyre doing activism that keeps them turning up.

In a new introduction to the Verso edition of Romance, Gornick celebrates the ordinary leftists she wrote about as exemplars of a certain kind of cultural hero who is often characterized as one who lives for the work. That their work never reached any kind of culmination they did not, in fact, overthrow global capitalism doesnt erase the impression that they succeeded in living lives of meaning. Meaningful work, Gornick writes, makes flare into bright life a sense of inner expressiveness that is incomparable. To feel not simply alive but expressive is to feel as though one has reached center. In the case of the communists, this centeredness glowed in the dark.

As always, when Gornick writes about the communists of Romance, she is also writing about herself. Im happy if what Ive learned in life is of use, but its not a motivation, she tells me. All I ever really wanted was to experience myself to the fullest.

The one story you shouldn't miss today, selected byNew York's editors.

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Vivian Gornick Doesnt Get the Hype - The Cut

In a letter published on January 11, 2020, the vice-president of the Spanish Bishops Conference warns the faithful against the direction new far Left coalition government wants to take.

Cardinal Antonio Canizares Llovera, former prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, is now Archbishop of Valencia and Vice-President of the Spanish Episcopal Conference.

The high prelate does not mince his words in the face of the new coalition government led by Pedro Sanchez, whom he sees as having created a situation more critical than anyone could have imagined: an essentially Marxist form of Communism which seemed to have been wiped out after the fall of the Berlin Wall has risen from the ashes, and that is what will surely preside over the destiny of Spain, he wrote on January 11 in a letter published by the Archdiocese of Valencia.

The Cardinal also warns against the advent of an intellectual orthodoxy of an absolutist and authoritarian nature, drawing a parallel with the situation in Latin American countries: at times, I end up thinking that what has happened in certain South American countries, for example in Venezuela (with the advent of Chavismo, a renaissance of Bolivarian socialismeditors note), is what is now taking place in the chamber of the Spanish parliament.

On January 8, Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez was invested by the Cortes and declined taking the oath on the Bible and the Crucifix. It was a strong gesture that surprised no one since the head of government finds himself at the head of a motley coalition, a catch-all in which are found several parties of the far Left which are all united in their burning hatred of Christianity, the Catholic Faith, and the natural order.

Moreover, Pedro Sanchez makes no secret of his corrupting and transgressive program: legalization of euthanasia, imposition in schools of sex education as revised to include gender ideology, spoliation of property belonging to the Church, suppression of Catholic chaplains in hospitals and other public establishments, and so forth.

We can better understand the serious tone in which Cardinal Canizares concludes his letter: With great pain, I must tell you and warn you that I have perceived an attempt to make Spain cease to be 'Spain'.

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Spain: The Church Denounces the Return of Communism - FSSPX.News

Jack Batson: On the Left

Does history repeat itself? Do we learn from history?

The answer to the first question is, yes, in that the pendulum of governance swings back and forth from liberal to conservative. Do we learn from history? Not much. There are experts who learn, but theyre pointy-headed snowflakes who are often drowned out by the barking jackals and baying wolves of politics.

So we might want to know if the present conservative state of mind has any antecedent. And well, well, now that you ask, yes, we have several previous outbreaks of conservative hysteria. In all previous cases, conservatives have become utterly convinced that some dreadful anti-American force is about to take us over, gobble us up and change the America that you and I know and love.

The first such episode occurred in 1692 in Salem. There, the devil himself was fast at work to possess people and overtake Gods chosen people, the godly folks of the theocracy of Massachusetts. Girls saw visions of the red fellow himself. At trial they would convulse as they saw spectral creatures lurking. These unseen spirits were admissible in court as spectral evidence, a category of evidence that would later be dispensed with for good reason.

Anyway, the Bible directed that Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live, so our godly ancestors dutifully hanged 19 people who presented such an intolerable threat to Gods own experiment. The victims, history shows, were Salems others, often single cranky women. Years later, formerly enthusiastic pastors apologized in repentance for the hysteria. The cloud lifted.

The second episode occurred in 1919 just after Lenin called for a worldwide communist revolution to include, of course, fair, trembling America. A young, gay crimefighter from the Justice Department, J. Edgar Hoover, was put in charge of defending us from communism. He rounded up all the commies he could find and exported them to their countries of origin and cleansed the nation of the pollution. It was called The Big Red Scare. It passed away.

Then came Joe McCarthy. The commies had just taken over China and the commies in North Korea had just invaded South Korea. Triumphant communism was on the march! The reds in the USSR had just exploded an A-bomb, stolen from us. Surely, someone had helped them get The Bomb so soon. Surely, there were commies in the government! Firing accusations like Yosemite Sam, drunken Joe McCarthy, waiving a piece of paper, claimed that he had the names of 205 card-carrying communists in the State Department. A week later the number changed. He couldnt divulge the names (because there were none), but they would be duly exposed, so a witch trial began again.

Joe and his evil attack dog, Roy Cohn, masquerading as a human being, suggested that President Dwight D. Eisenhower might be a communist or at least a fellow-traveler, because he endorsed Social Security and tolerated unions. But when he attacked the Army, he finally went too far. Finally, sir, have you no sense of decency? asked Army attorney Joseph Welch. The public, viewing that new-fangled TV thing, saw the thug in action. McCarthy lost his support and the frenzy subsided.

Finally, of course, we have todays frenzied convulsion. In the name of Americanism, President Trump-Putin is ending Americas 230-year experiment in democracy. This time the un-American, unpatriotic enemy is liberalism, the force that gave us the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and most of the moments and actions that have made us proud.

This time, however, the Joe Welches have been drowned out by the conservative media megaphone, led by Fox. Again, lies are told, told again, and told again. Again, passion overcomes reason: Our duly elected president did nothing wrong, No-Thing Wrong, NOTHING WRONG. They have no proof. NO PROOF!

This time, the barking jackals and howling wolves are tearing at the Constitution and leading us to authoritarian governance and Russification of our policies. The return of the pendulum may come too late. This time, the devil may win.

Jack Batson is a former member of the Fairfield City Council. Reach him atjsbatson@prodigy.net.

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Originally posted here:
On the Left: Witch hunts abound here - Fairfield Daily Republic

McCarthyism, often synonymous with the term witch hunt, evolved in American politics after 1950 and continued until 1957. This term was coined by a Republican Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy who served in the U.S. Senate from 1947 to 1957.

McCarthyism was described in the American political lexicon as the practice of publicly accusing American government employees of political disloyalty (Communism) and subversive activities. Hence, the Congress enacted the McCarran Act, also known as the Subversive Activities Control Act of 1950, to counter communism among members of the Communist Party of the U.S. and government employees who were loyal to a foreign power and secretly infiltrated American cultural and political institutions.

But a few years later this investigation gained notoriety for making baseless accusations against Americans with little regard for evidence and using unfair investigation methods while ignoring civil rights and liberties.

During this investigation, many government employees' careers were ended simply because they were accused of having communist sympathies. Moreover, under the McCarthyism investigation, many lives and reputations of Americans were ruined or blacklisted without credible evidence of any wrongdoing.

According to some historians, between 1947 and 1965, 5 million government employees were investigated, of which about 2,700 people were forced to leave their jobs and 12,000 people resigned.

Actually, this investigation violated the freedom of speech provided for in the First Amendment, one of the founding principles of the U.S. Constitution. The unfavorable McCarthyism investigation was very un-American, and it was dangerous to America.

In 1954, the McCarthy hearings were televised. When Sen. McCarthy accused an army officer of being a communist (the so-called Army-McCarthy hearings), it gave rise to backlash against McCarthyism.

Finally, the U.S. Supreme Court put an end to McCarthyism in 1957 to stop the irrational investigation. Today, McCarthyism is used as a term to indicate when the government violates due process by ignoring the civil rights of citizens. Overall, McCarthyism's biggest effect was that it created an anti-democratic atmosphere.

A modern version of the 'hunt'

Francis Fukuyama's article "The End of History" argued that the collapse of the Soviet Union and communism is imminent. Fukuyama acknowledged the victory of both politics and economy heading in the direction of a liberal order with the West and Western ideas.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the bipolar international system changed and left the U.S. an unchallenged power. The U.S. has changed its Cold War foreign policy strategy to emerge as a unipolar superpower of the world.

At the beginning of the 21st century, with the emergence of a multipolar system and globalization, U.S. foreign policy transitioned from the Old World order to a new one. The 21st century began with a new history for the U.S with the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack.

'War on Terror'

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the U.S. found a new enemy and launched a "war on terror." Many scholars described the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks as the initiation of a "new era" or "new world order" in international relations. The American military response to Sept. 11 was an unprecedented way of devising foreign policy strategy to kill terrorist Osama bin Laden.

It was clear that the U.S was justifying its unrivaled military operations on the pretext of a war on terror for the world leadership. In this regard, the invasion of Kuwait by then-Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was another opportunity to attack the Iraqi leader.

President George W. Bush, in the State of the Union address in 2002, made clear when he said to the world that "either you are with America or you are with the terrorists." Since then, the U.S. has expanded the war on terror regardless of who the president is.

In this regard, the term "witch hunt" was revitalized after Sept. 11 for the threat of terror in international affairs. The American government often targets Muslims, trying to catch or kill "terrorists" across the globe through military operations.

So, is the U.S.'s Terrorist Watch List a modern version of a witch hunt? The threat of terror has taken specific forms, particularly Islamic countries or groups. For example, the American government defined Iran, Iraq and Libya as "rogue states" to give the perception that those governments sponsor terrorism.

American presidents have expanded the targeting of states suspected of harboring terrorists to include "potential terrorist hotspots." The U.S. can justify its military attack on any sovereign country by using the threat of terror. American presidents' rhetoric culturally stereotypes non-Westerners as "others," particularly in the Muslim world, although Muslims have rejected all kinds of terrorism.

After World War II, anti-communism became hysterical until 1991, and from 2001 to present, the "war on terror" has become hysterical in international relations.

Paradigm on terrorism

A modern terrorism witch hunt began with the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11. This event has completely changed the world order vis-a-vis international relations.

Bush defined the Sept.11 attacks as "a new war," and this was the paradigm shift for the new world order in the 21st century.

The new paradigm is a war on terrorism on global scale since 2001, which is the top priority for national security. The Bush administration categorized the countries based on their involvement in the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

'Axis of Evil'

In this regard, the U.S. labeled North Korea, Iran and Iraq as the "axis of evil." Any country that was linked to the spread of WMD, ballistic missiles and development of nuclear weapons was also viewed as part of the "axis of evil." As a result, they were also considered supporters of terrorism.

In the long term, the implication of the war on terrorism has been building a new U.S.-led world order. That effort led the U.S. to adopt the role of "world policeman."

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the U.S. has been expanding its military operations on the pretext of global terrorism around the world (North Korea, Afghanistan, Iran, the Middle East and Africa, etc.) This is the U.S.'s renewed version of "witch hunts for terrorism" in international relations.

The last example of a terrorism witch hunt was the U.S. killing of Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani in a drone strike in Baghdad. President Donald Trump said that "he was a monster."

International relations have been undergoing fundamental changes since the introduction of the "war on terrorism" in 2001. This change is viewed as a paradigm shift for the new world order in international politics. In the 21st century, state affairs have been moving away from international norms led by Western ideas and liberalism to state affairs where international norms are no longer respected. In this situation, where no norms are important to anyone, states ultimately opt to choose military power in the international relations on the pretext of terrorism.

*Yksel holds a Ph.D. in political science and public management from Erciyes University.

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McCarthyism's transition in paradigm: 'Terror witch hunt' - Daily Sabah